The Best Printers For 2020

Whether you're looking for an inkjet printer, a fast-churning laser model, or a specialty printer for your home or office, here's all the buying advice you need to choose wisely and land the best printer for your needs. Also, check out our top-rated printers, all tested in our labs.

Bottom Line: HP's Tango X "smart printer," the first we've tested with voice activation and smart home features, is all about printing from mobile devices.
It's not perfect, but given its unique free-snapshot printing angle, it will be a tough act for future models to follow.

What Type of Printer Is Right for You?

Picking the right printer can be tough, with so many features to choose from, and individual printers with almost any possible combination of those variations available. Here are some pointers to help you find both the right category of printer and the right model within that type, along with our top-rated reviews.

The three most useful ways to categorize printers are by purpose (general or special), intended use (home or office), and technology. Define your needs by all three categories, and you're well on your way to finding the right printer.

Most printers, including most inkjets that manufacturers market as photo printers, are general-purpose models, meant for printing text, graphics, and photos. Special-purpose printers include portable printers, dedicated and near-dedicated photo printers, and label printers. (Even among specialty printers, 3D printers are a unique case, and beyond the scope of this discussion.) If you're looking for a model to print, say, photos, consider whether you want to print only photos or want a printer that can also produce other kinds of output.

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General-purpose printers tend to focus on photos if they're intended for home use or on text if they're intended for the office. Many all-in-one printers or MFPs are meant for the dual role of home and office printer (particularly for home offices), but generally favor one role over the other. Consider how you plan to use the printer, and pick one designed for that role.

The two most common technologies, laser and inkjet, increasingly overlap in capabilities, but there are still differences. The most important are that nearly all lasers (and laser-class models, such as solid ink and LED-based printers) print higher-quality text than nearly any inkjet, and almost any inkjet prints higher-quality photos than the overwhelming majority of lasers. Ask yourself whether text or photos are more important, and pick a technology accordingly.

Single-Function or All-in-One Printer?

For general-purpose printing, additional capability means choosing an all-in-one printer (AIO), also known as a multifunction printer (MFP). Those other functions include some combination of scanning, copying, and faxing from your PC, standalone faxing, and scanning to email. Office printers also typically add an automatic document feeder (ADF) to scan, copy, and/or fax multipage documents and legal-size pages. Some ADFs can handle two-sided documents, either by scanning one side, flipping the page over, and scanning the other side, or employing two sensors to scan both sides of the page on a single pass. (The latter is typically a more expensive solution.)

Some MFPs offer additional printing options. Web-enabled printers, both home and office models, can connect directly to the Internet via Wi-Fi to access and print out selected content without needing to work through a computer. Many Wi-Fi–enabled MFPs let you print documents and images from handheld devices. Some models let you email documents to the printer, which will then print them out. (In the last case, these functions might have a distinct name by manufacturer; for example, HP calls its email-print solution "HP ePrint," while Canon calls its version "Print From Email.")

Do You Need Color?

For a home printer, you probably need color, but for an office model, if all you print are business documents, there may be no reason to spend money on color output and the cost of maintaining four color toner cartridges versus one in black. Keep in mind, however, that many color lasers can print at high enough quality to make your own advertising handouts and trifold brochures, which could save you money compared with printing small quantities at your local print shop.

It's rare to see an inkjet with anything but color capabilities, but Epson does offer a few inkjet models in its WorkForce line that are high-volume and monochrome-only. If you want to stick with single-color black printing, though, you're otherwise looking at a monochrome laser or LED printer or MFP.

Space Considerations

Be sure to look into the printer's size, and don't underestimate just how big some of them can be, especially with trays extended. Even some home models can be uncomfortably large to share a desk with, and note that some printers with a small footprint can be tall enough to feel like they are towering over you. At the other extreme, we're seeing a growing number of compact versions that can fit into tight spaces in apartments, home offices, and dorm rooms.

Connectivity

In addition to a USB port, most office printers and an increasing number of home printers include Ethernet ports, so you can share the printer easily on a network. Many also include Wi-Fi capability. Even if they don't, if you have a wireless access point on your network, you can print wirelessly to any printer on that network, whether the printer itself offers a wireless connection or not. The printer just needs to be wired into the access point via Ethernet.

Printers that support Wi-Fi Direct (or its equivalent; some vendors use their own names for it) can connect directly to most Wi-Fi–enabled devices, even if your computer or handheld isn't designed to support Wi-Fi Direct. We're also seeing printers that can connect to and print from a mobile device via Near-Field Communication (NFC) by merely tapping the phone or tablet to a particular spot on the printer.

Output Quality

Printers vary significantly in output quality. You'll want to consider output quality for text, graphics, and photos separately, since high quality for one kind of output doesn't necessarily mean high quality for the others. Read deep-dive reviews like ours for the details.

Speed

If almost everything you print is one or two pages long, you probably don't need to concern yourself too much with how fast a printer is. If you output a lot of longer documents, speed is more important, which means you probably want a laser printer. As a rule, laser printers will be close to their claimed speeds for uncomplicated text documents, which don't need much processing time.

Inkjet printers often claim faster speeds than more expensive lasers, but usually don't live up to these claims. They have been getting faster, however, and some recent models can hold their own speed-wise against comparably priced lasers. Speedy inkjets will tend to be business-minded models; look into printers in the Canon Maxify, Epson WorkForce Pro, and HP PageWide Pro lines.

How Much Will You Print?

If you print only a few pages a day, you don't have to worry about how much a printer is designed to print, as defined by its recommended (not maximum) monthly duty cycle. If you print enough for the duty cycle to matter, however, don't buy a printer that doesn't include that information in its specifications. Figure out how much you print by how often you buy paper and in what amounts. Then pick a printer that's designed to print at least that much.

Also consider minimum and maximum paper size and whether you need a duplexer to print on both sides of the page. For input capacity, a useful rule of thumb is to get enough capacity so you should need to add paper no more than once a week.

Cost Considerations

Finally, be sure to consider the total cost of ownership. Most manufacturers will rate the cost per page, and many give a cost per photo. To get the total cost of ownership, calculate the cost per year for each kind of output (monochrome, color document, photo) by multiplying the cost per page by the number of those pages you'll print each year. Add these amounts to get the total cost per year. Then multiply that by the number of years you expect to own the printer, and add the initial cost of the printer. Compare the total cost of ownership figures between printers to find out which model will be least expensive in the long run.

For a head start on finding the right printer for your needs, check out our top picks below. We refresh the list monthly to include the newest high-rated products, but because of the large number of printers we review every year, not every top-rated product makes the cut. For the very latest reviews, and to search for more top-rated products, check out our printer product guide, as well as our favorite wireless printers, and our roundup of the best printers for Macs. You can also dig deeper—by print technology or paper type—and see our favorite inkjet, laser, and wide-format printers.

Bottom Line: HP's Tango X "smart printer," the first we've tested with voice activation and smart home features, is all about printing from mobile devices. It's not perfect, but given its unique free-snapshot printing angle, it will be a tough act for future models to follow.

About the Author

As Analyst for printers, scanners, and projectors, Tony Hoffman tests and reviews these products and provides news coverage for these categories. Tony has worked at PC Magazine since 2004, first as a Staff Editor, then as Reviews Editor, and more recently as Managing Editor for the printers, scanners, and projectors team.

In addition to editing, Tony has written articles on digital photography and reviews of digital cameras, PCs, and iPhone apps

Prior to joining the PCMag team, Tony worked for 17 years in magazine and journal production at Springer-Verlag New York. As a freelance writer, he’s written articles for Grolier’s Encylopedia, Health, Equities, and other publications. He won … See Full Bio